This is what Phineas Gage looked like!

What a big revelation to brain science geeks like me.

For those who don't know, Phineas Gage was a railroad worker in New England who had an accident one day that would revolutionize the medical field. The tampering iron with which he was working prematurely exploded and pierced through his left eye and frontal lobe (the front part of the brain). Gage did not become unconscious, however, and with the exception of a missing eye, seemed perfectly normal as he was being transported to the hospital. But as time went on, friends noticed a marked personality change. He became irascible and began having a childlike temper, pretty much a 180 degree shift from his warm and kind demeanor.



Because of this incident, doctors and scientists concluded that the frontal lobe plays a vital role in one's personality. Before then, no one quite knew what the frontal lobe did and some actually believed it did nothing or very little.

The story of how the picture was discovered is almost as impressive. From NPR:

In 1968, Jack and Beverly Wilgus were charmed by a daguerreotype of a man holding a metal rod. It showed a seemingly self-possessed young man, surprisingly handsome despite missing an eye.

"It has a real presence about it," Jack says.

The Wilguses thought the man must have been some kind of whaler. They titled the portrait "One Eyed Man with Harpoon" when they posted it on their Flickr account over a year ago.

Whaling experts soon debunked that theory. That's not a harpoon, they said, and that's no whaler. The mystery remained until another Flickr member, Michael Spurlock, noticed the image. "Maybe you found a photo of Phineas Gage?" his comment read.

"The first thing I did, of course, was to Google Phineas Gage," Beverly says. "The more I read, the more excited I got, because everything just fit."

It's not yet confirmed that the picture is truly of Phin Gage, but even the curator at Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard Medical School is convinced.

Note: It seems that The Boston Globe already had a story about this in July.